Sunday, June 22, 2014

The world is ablaze in an orgy of jihadi terror and war in the lands of Islam and no one seems to know what to make of it, let alone how to resolve the crisis.

The brutality of this mayhem was best captured in a deeply disturbing video released on the Internet by jihadis fighting for the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS).

It shows a bearded, young ISIS fighter in full battle gear posing for the camera with a decapitated head in his hand.

On cue from the cameraman, the jihadi fighter lifts the head, turns towards it and says, “Hello, my name is John.”

Both men then break into laughter, after which the cameraman derisively remarks, “Why doesn’t John look like he died of natural causes?”

The decapitated head is then thrown to the ground as another ISIS man can be heard off camera joking: “This guy died of natural causes by a knife ... It cut his throat”, to which the cameraman guffaws, “Natural causes — the mujahedeen ... Natural cause for an apostate,” before chanting the Islamic battle cry, “Allah O Akbar.”

This desecration of a dead body is not an isolated incident.

Just last year the Taliban were filmed playing football with the decapitated heads of beheaded prisoners — fellow Muslims.

And while much of the Islamic community is in a state of denial, blinded to the atrocities being committed by their co-religionists across the globe, the rest of the world watches in shock.

In Kenya and Nigeria Islamists are targeting Christians while in Iraq and Pakistan they are killing Shia Muslims, who Saudi-funded clerics have designated as “Kaffirs’”, non-believers in Islamic disguise whose founders, they falsely claim, were Jews.

The apologists among us claim these atrocities are not part of the Islamic rules of war, but that does not withstand scrutiny.

The fact is, no less a person than the grandson of Prophet Muhammad was beheaded in battle by fellow Muslims on Oct. 10, 680. His decapitated head was paraded in the streets of Damascus.

The eminent Egyptian Islamic reformer of the 20th century, Ali Abd al-Razik, writes in his book Islam and the Fundamentals of Authority that within a year of Prophet Muhammad’s death, political disputes among the Muslims were settled by public beheadings.

Raziq writes about one incident of early Islam when the celebrated Muslim general Khalid Ibn Walid made a cooking pot out of the decapitated head of another Muslim general, Malik ibn Nuwairah, after defeating him in a battle and beheading him as a POW.

Fortunately, Canada is the only western country that has a critical mass of liberal Muslims honest enough to acknowledge the fact that not all of our history is as unblemished as our parents and clerics wanted us to believe as children.

The slaughters we read about in Syria, Kenya, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan have common factors.

They’re the same ones that feature in the so-called honour killings and female genital mutilation of girls in the UK, Canada, America and Europe, as well as in much of the Arab world and Africa.

Those factors are Islamism and sharia.

The sooner we Muslims acknowledge this truth, the better equipped we will be to join the rest of humanity as partners in peace for our common good.